


Meditations on Character

by dirgewithoutmusic



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Analysis, Essays, Extrapolation, F/M, Gen, Why are things the way they are?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-25
Updated: 2014-02-25
Packaged: 2018-01-13 17:43:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1235395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a series of short essays in which I attempt to answer some questions for the sake of my own curiosity and piece of mind. </p><p>So far, I've rambled on: Mickey/Martha and how it might play out; how to tell Amy's story with agency attached; Rose's importance to Nine and to Ten; whether Martha Jones is technically a "companion," or if she's something more (I like Martha. I didn't use to. If you do not like Martha, you are missing out on some real fun).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pair the Spares?

**Author's Note:**

> The original post for this Mickey/Martha meta is located here: Originally posted here: http://ink-splotch.tumblr.com/post/27164632226/rose-my-grans-here-shes-still-alive-my-old

Martha and Mickey felt like a pair-the-spares ploy to me, when I first saw them together. Admittedly, I was distracted by the cresting painful waves of good-bye ( _"I don’t want to go"—_ it was madness, there were feels spewing everywhere), so I didn’t think too much about it.

This decision never seems to really have been explained. I don’t like this, because I value these characters too much to want to sit here thinking the story of their lives got thrown away on a whim. So I got to thinking— _why_  these two? Just because of the “Smith and Jones” joke? I hope not. What prompted the writers to think this necessary? Why would these two characters, who we barely even see meet, be especially expected to fall in love?

First, we have Martha Jones, UNIT doctor, protege of the Oncoming Storm, the Woman Who Walked the Earth.

Second, Mickey Smith, once a goofy, unambitious boyfriend of Rose; then the doppelganger of Rickey the hard-faced leader of rebels and most wanted man (for parking tickets); and then a man who returned to Earth when that alternate universe no longer needed him.

Mickey was a boy transformed into a hero. Martha was a doctor grown into a warrior.

They’re certainly badass enough for each other, but that’s hardly a rationale for a relationship.

The similarity between then that I find to be the most significant is this: Martha Jones and Mickey Smith are the two companions who willingly left the Doctor. Beyond that, they both left the Doctor for a purpose; Mickey to fight in the rebellion and care for his grandmother, and Martha to watch after those traumatized by the Year That Never Was.

(I find it interesting that she leaves the Doctor’s war-filled life specifically to go act as a healer, but by the next time we see her she’s clearly transitioned back into being a warrior, too. Martha will always be a doctor, yes, but I’m not sure she’ll ever get that war out of her blood).

Rose and Donna would have run with the Doctor forever; Amy and Rory live for each other; but Martha and Mickey live for others. Mickey had to grow into that mindset, but Martha had always had it. We see her in her first episode playing peacemaker with her family and working towards a profession all about helping others.

The way they come to define their lives, the choices they make—there’s a lot more in common between these two than I had thought.

They are the only two companions who chose to stay with a purpose, to defend. They are deeply and strongly loyal to something greater than them. Rose wanted the “better life” of saving worlds—but that’s a different kind of heroism, flash-bang excitement and never staying still. When Amy finally stays on Earth, it is for Eleven, so he does not have to bury her, and it’s for Rory.

Speaking of the Boy Who Waited, the epitome of loyalty, he too is very different from Martha and Mickey. Rory will wait 2000 years for Amy; Amy will tear the fabric of space and time apart for Rory (and has, more than once). Those loyalties are deep and strong and impressive; but Martha and Mickey’s are wide as well as deep. Of the companions, they are, I think, the heroes. Rose and Donna are adventurers, brave and good and empathetic. But Martha and Mickey gave up the stars to guard the Earth. Like Harriet Jones said, “the Doctor can’t always be here.”

In a lot of ways, Mickey and Rose outgrew each other. Rose certainly and clearly outgrew Mickey. She saw the stars—her first official adventure as the Doctor’s companion, she stands as the Last Human and watches the Earth die. If that’s not outgrowing your old life, I’m not sure what is.

Mickey, scaredy-cat, goofy Mickey who clings to her when she returns, is clearly outgrown. Taking him into the TARDIS might have been a way for Mickey to grow to a level again, to win her back— but I’m really glad that it wasn’t. He grows, certainly, to her level, but they grow in different ways and that’s a really important thing that the writers recognized. By the end, they’re on each other’s level, they are worth each other, these two Children of Time (the Doctor leaves no one unchanged)—but they’re not compatible anymore.

Rose and the Doctor would have traveled the stars until she was old and grey, I think, discovering, investigating, grinning those twin enthused, mad grins— but Mickey would have made a different choice. He did made a different choice, more than once, when he stayed to fight the Cybermen, and then again when he comes back. He chooses again and again a different kind of heroism. He chooses to stay and to defend.

Martha takes all the lessons she has learned from the Doctor about adventures and ruthlessness, kindness, heroics, and diving into mysteries head-on, and chooses a different calling. The Doctor is a great explorer, a scout, a detective, an adventurer. He goes to deep dark place and fights the shadows.

Martha Jones is a soldier.

It’s a quieter kind of heroism than the Doctor’s brash feats. It has to do with being on a team, with valuing things larger than oneself, with trusting the people around you. (The Doctor and his trust issues, I think, might even rival Amy Pond’s and that’s saying something). Martha Jones is very very brave, and very very Good.

I don’t know how they fell in love. Maybe RTD does, I don’t know. I wish we could have gotten a  _Martha Jones: Defender of the Earth_  spin-off (because more badass on my screen is never a bad thing) and watched that unfold. She shows up in some  _Torchwood_  episodes, yeah? I need to watch those.

But I can imagine all the ways in which these two are uniquely suited to each other. The two who, when offered the stars, decided that a patch of earth and a people to defend outweighed all else.

I would have liked to see Mickey deal with the loss of Rose, who might no longer have been his girlfriend, but who was certainly still one of his best friends. I would have liked to see his return to a world he had left as a noncombative, unambitious goofy youngster. He returns as a scarred leader of men to a world that at least seems on the surface to be at peace. That would, I think, have been an interesting story.

I would have liked to see Martha reconcile the doctor-to-be she’d dreamed of being with the woman who had held her own beside the Oncoming Storm, who’d fought the Family of Blood alone, who’d walked a dying Earth in the Year That Never Was. Martha Jones was a legend, a whispered story around trash can bonfires, told in shattered houses just outside the worst of the radiation signature, in crowded desperate tenements.

And then she came home, back to her family’s quaint little house, her 9-to-5 job, the petty competitiveness of med students, the sight of her mother’s traumatized face amidst the pastel colors of her childhood living room… It would have been a story.

How long did it take her to realize she couldn’t go back to the old life she’d planned for herself since she was eight with a plastic stethoscope around her neck? I would have liked to watch her come to acknowledge that she had a new definition of the word  _doctor_ ; that what she strove to be now, what she  _was_  now, because Martha Jones of all people has earned the title of  _doctor_ , was not just a healer but a warrior.

It would have been a story.


	2. Rose Tyler: the Heart of the Doctor (the bridge from Nine to Ten)

_Fantastic_ was Nine’s catch phrase, certainly, but sometimes it felt almost as though  _stupid apes_  was instead.

That bitterness, born of trauma and war, of trust betrayed, defines Nine; and also points to why Rose is so important. (They’re all important—people, by definition, are important—but Rose was who Nine needed at that moment, with his leather jacket, his big grin, and the dark temper and shattered trust lurking underneath).

Nine had just come from a war where he saw the greatest of heroes fall to ruthlessness in their pursuit of victory. But Rose, oh that’s the beauty of Rose, isn’t it? She didn’t set out to be heroic. She’s not trying to be special. It’s almost accidental, but she leaps into trouble with a whole heart. She reminds the Doctor that the soul of a person can be as beautiful as a super novae, which is exactly what Nine needed.

He can feel the world turning under his feet, as he says the first time he meets her; he has seen the greatest of the Time Lords fall into corruption, despair, and madness; he knows the ravages of war, the slow and creeping insanity of loneliness, what it feels like to have the blood of your own people on your hands.

Nine was a man running, always feeling on the brink of a fall. In  _Rose_ , the first time he slows down enough for a little exposition about himself, he gives a lovely, thrilling little speech about the world turning. It’s an exciting moment, certainly, but listen to it: those are the words of a man who thinks he has no place to land. Those are the words of a man who expects destruction the moment he stops running from it, the moment he stops clinging so desperately.

> **Nine  
> ** I can feel it. The turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinnin’ at 1,000 miles an hour and the entire planet is hurtling around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, and I can feel it. We’re fallin’ through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go… That’s who I am.

What it took, in the end, was the light in a young girl’s eyes— the delight, the shared wonder, the friendship certainly—but also unthinking generosity, mercy and selfless bravery.

Rose Tyler was nineteen years old and not a nineteen who had seen much life. I always try to remember that. She does some stupid things, and she does some selfish things, but when the cards are down I think she almost always errs on the side of mercy ( _Dalek_ ) and bravery ( _The Parting of Ways_ , and so many others). 

The beauty of Rose is, once she’s been shown how to be fantastic—no, I apologize. She’s always been fantastic. I don’t want the responsibility for Rose Tyler to be put on the Doctor. She is, first and foremost, her own creator. She is brave because she is brave, she is merciful because she is, honest because she is honest. That’s who she is. (That’s what DW does so well. It never allows the extraordinary situations be the impetus that makes the companions extraordinary. It is always themselves).

Rose was always extraordinary; her life was ordinary. But the Doctor… well, the Doctor showed her another way to live.

If Rose had worked in the shop until she was 82, married Mickey, had four kids, and died in her bed, she would still, always, have been Rose. She would have always had the potential to show mercy to a Dalek, to become the Big Bad Wolf.

The Doctor saw something brave in her, bold and honest and strong (sounds like I’m describing coffee, jeez), so he offered her all of time and space. And that bravery was important but what I love is that Rose was not in the end what the Doctor expected.

He wanted a companion because he likes an audience, because he’s lonely, because the universe is amazing and he wants to share. He wants someone brave enough, someone hungry enough for adventure and wonder, someone crazy enough to go with him. Rose was all those things. The Doctor wasn’t wrong, but there was so much more than that, she was so much better than that. She was brave, but she was good, too. She was honest, merciful and exuberant.

Nine so often expects the least of her, and he so rarely gets it. In a lot of ways, she’s better than he is ( _Dalek_ ) and by the end, I think he realizes that. That’s one of the most important things the Doctor learns from Rose, or rediscovers—that people put in awful situations can make beautiful choices, that at the heart of things people have so much potential for good.

Nine needed Rose. He’d lost faith in people. He left that all with the Time Lords and the Daleks. Rose, in an act of grief and compassion and ignorance, saves her father’s life and changes time and Nine explodes.

> **The Doctor  
> ** I did it again. I picked another stupid ape.
> 
> I should have known. It’s not about showing you the universe. It never is. It’s about the universe doing something for you. 

Nine has his moments of faith—in  _The Doctor Dances_ , closer to the end of his character arc, talking about Britain’s underdog bravery in World War Two—but he’s so much more likely than Ten to jump to the worst, even with Rose (or even especially). Ten breaks into vicious tempers at villains, certainly, but he believes in heroes. Nine didn’t. He wouldn’t have been surprised in  _Midnight_ , just bitterly reaffirmed.

And that’s what’s so important about Rose. She proves him wrong, over and over again. In  _Dalek_ , she shocks him with her ability of kindness, where he is spittingly furious, willingly destructive.

> **Dalek  
> ** The Daleks must survive!
> 
> **The Doctor  
> ** The Daleks have  _failed_! Now why don’t you finish the job, and make the Daleks extinct?! Rid the universe of your  _filth_! Why don’t you just  ** _die?!_**
> 
> **Dalek  
> ** You would make a good Dalek.

And meanwhile Rose is showing it mercy, kindness, and sympathy. The hero of that episode is hands-down Rose Tyler. The look on the Doctor’s face as he realizes this kid he picked up on a whim has a strength to her compassion beyond anything he’d expected— that was the first moment I was entirely and whole-heartedly sold on that companionship.

And that continues throughout the first series. He tries to trust Rose, but Nine keeps falling back into bad habits— _Father’s Day_  is a priceless example—and she keeps disproving him. He’s furious in  _Father’s Day,_ for her act of grief. But over the course of the episode, he watches her discover the consequences of her actions, watches her meet her father and see the life she could have led with this sweet, goofy, well-intentioned bumbler of dad, and then watches her let Pete make the decision to die—she lets him go because it’s  _the right thing to do_  and because it’s  _Pete’s choice_ —Nine watches her go out with tears and kindness and sit with her dad, broken in the street, so he doesn’t have to die alone. If that’s not bravery, holding the hand of a man you were desperate to save but allowed to die—well, gosh.

Rose changes the Doctor, for the better. She takes this bitter, faithless man— the Doctor loves the universe, sure, thinks it wild and fantastic and brilliant, but the Time War broke him in terms of people, in terms of trust. She reminds him that there’s good in people—and that certainty that he learns from her carries on with him so strongly that it’s nearly a defining trait of Ten.

Nine yells. Nine expects the worst. Nine’s still mostly in the Time War, expecting horrors to come from the hands of friends, genocide from his own. And that’s what I love about Ten’s speech in  _The Impossible Planet_.

> So that's the trap, the great test, the final judgement, I dunno. But if I kill you, I kill her. 
> 
> But that implies, in this big grand scheme of gods and devils, that she's just a victim. Well, I've seen a lot of this universe. I've seen fake gods and bad gods and demi-gods and would-be gods. I've had the whole pantheon. 
> 
> But if I believe in one thing, just one thing, I believe in her.

To remember where he’s come from, anger and bitterness and  _stupid apes_ , and see it come to this.

_I believe in her._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted here: http://ink-splotch.tumblr.com/post/27100827731/fantastic-was-nines-catch-phrase-certainly-but


	3. The Woman Who Walked the Earth

Martha was initially my least favorite companion (not to say I didn’t like her, but, jeez, I loved everyone else  _so much_ ). Then my dear doctorcakeray linked me to this post: [Ten Little Bullets in my Hand: Meta anvil o’ the day](http://tenlittlebullets.tumblr.com/post/16417574220/meta-anvil-o-the-day). And, now, well, now everyone’s my favorite. I LOVE EVERYBODY IN THIS TIMEY-WIMEY BAR OKAY?

You see, originally, I found Martha to have the least dynamic connection with the Doctor; and so I found her to be the least dynamic companion. She didn’t have the glowing joy of Rose, or the cantankerous, sympathetic brilliance of Donna, or the sharp, sassy and flirtatious fairytale presence of Amy Pond. And so in a lot of ways it’s true: she  _doesn’t_  have the most dynamic connection to the Doctor. She’s not a foil. She’s not Rose teaching him the world  _is_ still full of hope and wonder, even in the aftermath of terrible trauma. She’s not Donna yanking on the leash of his morality, calling him out on his mistakes, and fiercely and stubbornly demanding the best of him. She’s not Amy, teasing him with self-contained ease and confidence, or crying out  _You said five minutes!_ with heart-wrenching accusation (While he lost Rose, and was forced to rob Donna of all her growth and hard-earned self confidence, Amy is the companion whose life he scarred perhaps beyond repair;  _twelve years, four psychiatrists!_ ; and there’s an intriguing edge of guilt and redemption, of promises owed, in their relationship).

Martha’s relationship with the Doctor is less contrary, and therefore maybe it seems less dynamic, than the other companions because  **Martha’s not the Doctor’s foil.**  She, like the writer in the above link said, is his mirror; and you know what? That’s absolutely  _fascinating_. She’s the most like him in the darkest places of his soul—and the most like him in the most badass places of his soul, too.

And I think RTD and the writers knew this, because I don’t think there’s a season where the Doctor and his companion spend more time apart than in Season Three. Martha’s importance is not as a companion, but as a  _human being_ , as a hero and as someone finding her own worth.

The first time Martha won me over was in her first episode, fittingly enough, and fittingly enough she did it as a  _character_  and not a companion. Her hospital is taken to the moon and she opens the window.

OPENS THE WINDOW. ON THE MOON.

It was a sensibility thing, not a bravery (or an insanity) thing. Windows aren’t air tight. So, whatever was holding in what they were breathing? Well, it wasn’t the window. And as long as she was on the moon, as long as something was keeping her breathing, she wanted to see the moon. She wasn’t going to sit there and let a psychological fear of opening windows without air outside them keep her from doing that.

> **The Doctor:**  Fancy going out?
> 
> **Martha:**  Okay.
> 
> **The Doctor:**  We might die.
> 
> **Martha:**  We might not.
> 
> **The Doctor:**  Good. Come on.

She’s smart, she’s educated, and she’s got her eyes wide-open. She’s the one who reminds  _the Doctor_  to take a moment to appreciate that he’s standing on the surface of the moon without a space suit.

The season rolls on, and it does something unique, I think. Instead of telling the story of the Doctor and his companion, it tells the story of the Doctor  _apart_  from his companion. It’s not so much about companionship as it is about equality and a person discovering her strength.

> **Martha:**  I can’t just be a passenger anymore.
> 
> **The Doctor** : Well you were never really just a passenger were you?

The most important thing about Martha is not that she is the Doctor’s companion. The most important thing about Martha is that she is Martha Jones. Over and over again she proves herself to be a brilliant agent of heroics, independent of the Doctor.

In the stories centered around Family of Blood, Martha is all by herself in a hostile environment. She is handed the responsibility of taking care of  _the Doctor_  himself, when he is hidden and helplessly oblivious to everything. She is fiercely reliable, capable, and independent. 

One of the greatest culminations of this, though, is of course the Year That Never Was, in which Martha Jones walked the earth and saved the world.

> **Tom** : There’s a lot of people depending on you. You’re a bit of a legend.
> 
> **Martha** : What does the legend say?
> 
> **Tom** : That you sailed the Atlantic, walked across America. That you were the only person to get out of Japan alive. “Martha Jones,” they say, “she’s gonna save the world.”

The sheer list of achievements of Martha Jones is boggling. She walked an apocalyptic Earth, a woman on her own, telling stories of the Doctor. She fashions herself into something efficient and strong, the kind of Good that is as blinding and terrible as it is brilliant—much like the Doctor himself. She reinvents herself, as a person, as a  _doctor_ ; I do think that’s significant, that they are both doctors, both individuals who put the value of their lives into saving others’.

> **The Doctor:**  I’m the Doctor.
> 
> **Martha:**  Me too, if I ever pass my tests. What is it then, Dr. Smith?
> 
> **The Doctor:**  Just the Doctor.
> 
> **Martha:**  How d’you mean,  _just the Doctor_?
> 
> **The Doctor:**  Just. The Doctor.
> 
> **Martha:**  What, people call you  _the Doctor_?
> 
> **The Doctor:**  Yeah.
> 
> **Martha:**  Well I’m not. As far as I’m concerned you’ve gotta earn that title.

She’s someone studying to be a doctor, until the Doctor himself sweeps her away on adventures and shows her another way to save lives (and not just lives but worlds). He shows her that  _doctor_  can mean a warrior as well as a healer. She becomes her own kind of Oncoming Storm, the woman with the Osterhagen Key in her hand, her thumb over the red button.

She is not a companion in the same way Rose, Donna, or Amy are. She is not a foil, but a mirror. I think it is her similarity with the Doctor, as well as the closeness of the loss of Rose, which makes him stand more distant from her than from the others. But because he withholds his emotions and doesn’t invest in her as instantly as he did with Rose, or as he will with little Amelia Pond, he is able to do something different and equally important. Martha does not leap into his heart as companion and soul-mate. She, step by step, word by word, heroic feat by brilliant heroic feat,  _earns his respect_.

> **The Doctor** : Martha Jones, you saved the world.
> 
> **Martha:**  Yes I did. I spent a lot of time with you thinking I was second best, but you know what?  _I am good._

This is vitally important to her, of course, as she realizes her own self-worth; it’s telling, I think, that this brilliant woman is the one who decides for herself that it is time to leave the TARDIS, because there are lives outside of it which only she can save (the traumatized few who remember the Year that Never Was).

But this slow discovery of respect, I think, is also vital to the Doctor. She is, as we’ve said, his mirror. As he slowly learns to respect this clever, determined young woman, he is also coming to rebuilt his own self-respect, which was shattered, like all of him, in the Time War. Rose rebuilt his faith in the universe, but Martha rebuilt his faith in himself.

Rose had his love. Donna had his friendship. Martha, though, earns his respect, and she earns mine, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted here: http://ink-splotch.tumblr.com/post/25492588391/doctor-who-meme-five-brotps-ten-x-martha


	4. Companions? Appendages? Heroes?

Each time a companion does their epic now-it’s-my-turn-to-save-the-world, the parallels are interesting. Rose absorbs the time vortex, becomes all-powerful and saves her Doctor. Donna Noble instead is given the brain of a Doctor (as opposed to, with Rose, I suppose the brain of a TARDIS?). Amy Pond has all the universe inside her head from a childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood of the secrets of said universe whispering through the crack in her wall.

(Except for, you know, Martha Jones, who is just like, “Yep, sure, I’ll just wander war-torn, disease-ridden, apocalyptic earth for a year, build a legend in my own name and in the Doctor’s, no big deal,” but then I think we’ve already established that Martha Jones’s companionship with the Doctor had a different purpose than any of the others—protege might have been a better word?).

So, each of the companions, excepting the no-I’m-lying-I-actually-fulfill-a-completely-different-function-than-“companion” Martha, wins their greatest victory with the aid of a power outside them, normally one linked directly with the Doctor—the Time Vortex at the heart of his ship; his own expansive mind; or the cracks in the universe he loves, which were made by the explosion of the ship he loves. Hm.

Except.

Except, I think I’m reading this wrong. The Time Vortex is not the  _point_  of Rose’s victory as Bad Wolf. The Time Vortex did not hijack Rose, or force her to return to the TARDIS, to the Doctor, and to Satellite Five.

The point—and this is one of the points I love in Doctor Who, that shows up over and over again; the point is always  _people_ , it’s always the heroism of an individual who didn’t have to be heroic, who often was not supposed to be heroic; it’s about ordinary lives being extraordinary, being  _fantastic_ , being  _brilliant_ , being (hi Eleven you silly, lovely man)  _cool_.

The point of that victory is not the Time Vortex. It is, as it always is, a person, in this case Rose, and a choice, in this case to not give up, to refuse safety in exchange for those she loves.

> **Rose** : But it was, it was a better life. I don’t mean all the travelling and seeing aliens and spaceships and things. That don’t matter. The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life… You don’t just give up. You don’t just let things happen. You make a stand. You say “no.” You have the guts to do what’s right when everyone else just runs away! and I just can’t…!

Rose didn’t have to restart the TARDIS. She didn’t have to look into the Vortex. She could have gone on with her life; Nine had  _asked_ her to go on with her life, to make it a fantastic one. But there it is again, that point. Rose chose to be a hero. She chose to look into something that would burn her up from the inside out, instead of living out a healthy life with Mickey and her mum, dreaming of stars and blue boxes. That the power to save the day in  _The Parting of Ways_  didn’t come directly from her is something I can live with, because the choice did, whole-heartedly and entirely. And choice, when you come down to it, is what makes a person.

And then we have Donna, brash and beautiful Donna, wonderful Donna, who has an entire episode emphasizing the importance of choice ( _Turn Left_ , anyone?). In _Parting of Ways_  she takes in a copy of the Doctor’s mind while another copy of the Doctor is born from her. In some ways, it seems like maybe her ability to succeed here is based on the Doctor’s skills and not on hers—but it’s not. 

> **The Doctor** : Why did we never think of that?
> 
> **Donna Noble** : Because you two were just Time Lords, you dumbos!

And, yes, the Doctor Donna was made from the Doctor; but she was also made out of Donna.

Doctor Donna wasn’t special because she was part Time Lord. She was special because she was part-human, and specifically because that part was  _Donna Noble_ , cantankerous and loud with her  _Oi!_ 's, unaware of her own wonderfulness, deeply empathetic. Again, it's the point: the important thing isn't the power but the person.

And, well, if you want to read about Amy Pond and choice, click "Next Chapter."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted here: http://ink-splotch.tumblr.com/post/25591724194/each-time-a-companion-does-their-epic


	5. Petrichor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is how I get myself to sleep at night. 
> 
> I love Amy Pond. Moffat gets under my skin--there are things he's really good at! Sure. But those things aren't thinking women are multi-faceted people, as much as he (arguably) tries, and multi-faceted women are pretty much why I'm here. 
> 
> So this is my best refocusing of Amy's story, the one I tell myself when I want to love her with every bit I've got and not feel guilty. She's got such potential and Karen did an excellent job with everything she was given.

I love Amy Pond but sometimes it’s hard to wrap yourself up in the story of the Girl Who Waited and not feel a little robbed.

Because on one hand, this is a narrative framed around a girl waiting for a man to come save her. If there’s a young woman trapped in a tower guarded by a dragon, I want her to be freeing herself, breaking down the door and sneaking past the monster; or reveling in a little solitude for once, reading books, doing mad science, and painting abstract murals on the stone walls; or picking the lock on the chain around the dragon’s neck and flying off on his back to have wild world-roving adventures. Amy, defined most importantly in the narrative as a girl who waited for a man to come back, while Rory got to run off and be all Last Centurion and the Doctor got to run off and be all… Eleven-y, was something that did not sit well with me.

Waiting  _can_  be a heroic, mind-bogglingly brave act. Rory’s time as the Last Centurion is a brave act. But that’s because he got a choice. He could have taken the short cut, but he decided to stand by his wife and defend her though the centuries. I love Rory’s constant stead-fastness and I cheered for him here. (I wish we’d spent a little more time on what it would be like to have an extra 2000 years in your head, but, then, a lot of things ended up falling through the cracks of Season Six and I suppose we’ll just have to fill in the blanks ourselves).

For Amy, her first stretch of waiting was not a choice. She was left for twelve years (and then two more), waiting for the Doctor to come back. Her second stretch of waiting, in the quarantined planet for 36 years in the episode  _The Girl Who Waited_ , was also not a choice. She was stuck in that world, alone and constantly under attack.

(She was so badass in that, by the way. Some people compare Rory’s time as the Last Centurion to Amy’s thirty-six years in that lost time line and wonder why she was driven to a dark and cynical despair; but Rory could see people (and I bet he even got to interact with them, however sparingly), was not in a never-ending fight for his life with weapons he had to manufacture from odds and ends, and Rory had made a  _choice_  to be there. I am not at all surprised that a bit of Amy’s soul broke; that she was functional at all was a deeply impressive statement about her resiliency, actually. It  _certainly_  does not make her any weaker than Rory. The Ponds are quite simply badass across the board).

It’s a problem that Amy’s main title (the Girl Who Waited), especially in this show where titles are so important (the Oncoming Storm, the Last Centurion, Stormageddon, Doctor-Donna, Bad Wolf), was not one built on her choices, but one built on either others’ choices or the whims of world and plot. On one hand. 

However, I did promise another hand. So, on the other hand, you  _could_  argue Amy’s life  _was_  one based on her choices. And the more I think about it the more that it becomes the story I want to argue for (because, like I said, girls who sit in their tower waiting for their prince are not the ones I wish to read stories about). I don’t think it’s the story they (hi Moffat) were writing, and the story and titles they _did_ write are still a problem whichever hand you choose here. 

But this story is the one I want for my Amy. So here we go. 

Amy had a choice.

She couldn’t choose to have the Doctor come back sooner; or to escape the quarantined planet. There exist impossible situations, and these were some of them. I can accept that. What she was able to choose was what to  _do_ about the situations she was put in. And it seems, to me, that each and every time she chooses to fight like the brave and badass Pond she is.

In the 36 years in quarantine, she could have chosen to give up at any time. In different eyes, escape would not have been the only impossibility—sheer survival would have seemed beyond reach. But Amy Pond kept fighting, not just with guts and gumption, but with bravery, intelligence, and creativity. She built a  _sonic screwdriver_. She found a safe space, made a Rory-bot to keep from going completely insane, built armor, weapons, and  _survived_. She kept fighting, first in hope of her promised rescue, and then, once that seemed impossible, when the Girl Who’d Been Left Behind Over and Over Again decided that this time the leaving was for good, she  _still_ kept fighting.

Amy refused to give up on herself, even when she gave up on her Raggedy Man and her Rory. She made a choice. Amy Pond, with no one to back her up, with her homemade sonic screwdriver and armor, her weathered face and sheer gumption, was no damsel in distress. “Aim for the shins” indeed.

But what about the little girl with the fairy-tale name, left behind in her big empty castle, a dragon hiding in the crack in her wall? In what way is framing her entire character around the Doctor’s actions (he came, he left; he came and left again; finally he took her with him) something that can be defined as empowering as opposed to belittling?

If you can’t tell, this bothered me for a  _long_  time. I love Amy’s sharp spunk, her ingrained tendency to disobey every rule she sees, and also Karen Gillan’s face. It bothered me that a character I enjoyed so much got cornered into a role I found potentially harmful to her (in my opinion) inalienable right to define her own self.

But, I’ve wrapped my mind around it enough that, I think, I can get behind the Girl Who Waited as something every bit as much her choice as Rory’s choice had been as the Boy Who Waited.

She didn’t have to believe.

She didn’t have to be the Girl Who Waited. She could have been the Girl Who Had a Weird Dream Once and Got on With Life. She could have been the Girl No One Ever Thought was Crazy and the Girl Who Didn’t Expose Herself to Public Humiliation By Insisting Her Imaginary Friend was Real.

But she did, because she is Amy Pond, and when given a choice between fighting and giving in, even when the whole world is against her ( _especially_  when the whole world is against her), she  _fights_.

> **Amy** : Twelve years and  _four psychiatrists_!
> 
> **The Doctor** : …Four?
> 
> **Amy** : …I kept biting them!
> 
> **The Doctor** : Why?
> 
> **Amy** : They said you weren’t real.

Throughout it all, Amy believes in the things she’s seen. At seven, she had an imaginary friend who promised her the universe, and she never gave up believing in him. She fought tooth and nail (um, pun kinda intended) against anyone who told her otherwise. In another world, the one where the world was ending, a different seven year old Amelia Pond believed in stars, no matter how many people told her she was crazy and that the night sky had always been nothing but black.

She clings so terribly strongly to her own definition of reality, when she doesn’t have to, when it would be  _easier_  to believe what  _every other single person_  she knows says is true. She refuses to rely on anybody else’s definition of the universe, because she’s seen the impossible, an impossible man in an impossible box, an impossible crack in the wall with impossible secrets spilling out from it. She made the brave and difficult choice to trust herself, when everyone else doubted her.

Amy Pond is the Girl Who Waited and she chose to be. She chose the harder path, to cling to what she knows to be true when her entire world told her she was insane. Think about it— the number of times it’s been Amy against the world. A kid certain her Raggedy Man is real, biting psychologist after psychologist who claims she’s crazy or lying, telling everyone she knows and not giving two pence about what they think. Another kid, or the same kid in another timeline, insisting that stars are real, when no one in the world has ever seen them. A young woman at her wedding remembering a world she once knew, and believing in it so hard amidst a fading, dying, oblivious universe that she brings all of creation back into being.  In yet another alternate universe, an eye-patched Amy controls an organization of soldiers in a battle against the Silence, leads them with strength and decisiveness, and kills the woman who had irreversibly stolen her daughter’s childhood. In this world, too, she is yet again the only one who remembers the truth, and again she has enough faith in herself to trust her own word over everyone else’s. And then also, a woman, all alone, with nothing but guts, gumption, and an encyclopediac voice in the sky, fighting to stay alive against every other being on the entire planet, for thirty-six years.

Melody Pond is a superhero, definitely, but so is her mom.

I love the glimpse of Amy in the sequence above, the girl who prayed to Santa all grown up, the Wendy who’s left behind her Peter Pan. She’s had her adventures as the Doctor’s companion, she knows her Raggedy Man is real, and she’s ready to move on with her life. She’s a successful model and businesswoman (clearly, she named the perfume and decided the marketing strategy— I love the call back to  _petrichor_ , by the way.  _The Doctor’s Wife_ was a fabulous episode). She is the Girl Who Believed in the Doctor, but she’s also so much more, and she  _knows_ it. She’s off to grand and crazy new adventures, faithful Rory in tow, River popping in between adventures to share a glass of white wine and stories, and she’s ready to take the world by storm. Whatever else happens in her life, whatever pitfalls and whatever windfalls, Amy Pond is going to keep on fighting, because that’s who she is—or, rather more importantly, because that’s the choice she’s always made when the cards were down.

Amy Pond, the Girl Who Never Surrenders.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted here: http://ink-splotch.tumblr.com/post/25480653144/i-love-amy-pond-but-sometimes-its-hard-to-wrap


	6. Why Did You Say Five Minutes? (shattering a child with a fairytale name)

For Amy, this is a story about growing up, about trust, and about belief. For the Doctor, this is a story about his death.

Amy Pond is not a girl in a tower guarded by a dragon. But she is very alone. She got taught very early that you can’t trust anyone but yourself—people disappear, though cracks or in blue boxes; they make promises and don’t keep them; they don’t listen to you and they don’t believe you (or, if they do, they  _say five minutes_ and don’t come back); they tell you things aren’t real, when you know they are.

Amelia Pond learned, from four psychologists and a world against her, that the only person in the world worth believing in was herself.

In some ways, her grasp on reality was a bit tenuous, actually. In  _Amy’s Choice_ , she swaps so easily between worlds. She bases, ultimately, her definition of reality on whether or not Rory exists. He, though she is far from coming to that realization fully, is her lodestone. He is what she comes home to.

This doesn’t make her weaker. Relying on other people is never a thing that makes you weak. (In fact it’s very very brave, especially for someone like Amy Pond, who has thoroughly messed-up trust issues). The narrative certainly proves she can survive without Rory. In  _The Girl Who Waited_ , she lives thirty-six years of bad-ass robot-slaying and foraging on the Two Streams world, no Rory, no Doctor, no back-up but a friendly encyclopediac voice in the sky. Amy is certainly capable of handling her own self.

It isn’t that she needs Rory because she’s too weak to act on her own or anything as silly as all that. (It’s not even that specifically needs  _Rory_ , but she does need  _someone_  to trust, and he’s the only one stubborn enough to stick around long enough to wear her down). She needs Rory because she’s a human being and we, as a general rule, need other people. We need to trust them and we need to rely on them; but when you’re a girl with as screwed-up of an interpretation of trust as Amy has, that’s really difficult. Amy accepting that she loves Rory, that she trusts him, and that she can rely on him (and that  _he_  can rely on  _her_ , because gosh it’s important to be on a level playing field in any relationship)—for Amy, that’s very very brave.

(And framing  _trust_  as something brave, and human connection as something vital, though, I think that’s an important thing to say. As with most of series Five and Six, I just wish they’d spent a bit more time expanding on the concept. Oh, well, I suppose that’s what blabbering online meta-writers are for).

She has parents who disappeared (from  _existence)_ and she is the only one even vaguely aware they once existed. She has a crack in her bedroom wall that whispers the secrets of the universe to her, and no one listens when she says it scares her. Well, not quite no one: the Doctor listens.

The Doctor is the first person to listen to her. He is her first prayer that Santa ever answered. Little Amelia’s certainly been given enough evidence at this point to believe that people don’t listen to you, and mostly just let you down. But she gives this Policeman from Santa a chance, and he listens. I imagine if he had stayed, if the TARDIS hadn’t malfunctioned, she would have grown up to be a different woman.  

But he tells her  _five minutes_  and then he disappears.

I bet this was the last straw, the last evidence that people were never going to listen and never going to  _stay_.

So what do we have here? Twelve years of a girl with a neglectful aunt, a missing memory of missing parents, a magic policeman in the night who promised to help and didn’t deliver, four psychiatrists and a town convinced she’s crazy for telling the truth— if I was Amy Pond, I’d have trust issues, too.

She seems to have two main focuses: one, the expectation that no one will stay; and two, the expectation that no one will believe her. It’s interesting, thinking about her and Rory growing up together. By the time she befriended him, she was clearly already cemented into this distrust, because Rory very clearly will never leave her and will always believe her (or at least will always listen—even  _he_ thought the Doctor was imaginary, but he still played the games with her), and Amy very clearly doesn’t believe that’s true. She decides she’ll leave him first, running off with the Doctor the night before their wedding; over and over again she refuses to commit to him ( _my sorta-boyfriend,_  she introduces him as), because she’s lost any faith in the idea that promises last, or that people stay.

For Amy, I think, for this left-behind little girl, for this damaged young woman, coming to trust Rory Williams (Rory Pond) is one of the bravest things she does. Someone with as little trust in others as Amy has (someone who has  _earned_  the right to have as little trust in others as she does), does not do that easily. She offers eventually that trust to Rory with the full knowledge of what it feels like to have trust betrayed, with the full knowledge of, in her twenty-one years of life, just how common that betrayal has been.

She doesn’t even trust the Doctor, in a lot of ways. Which is interesting and, I think, necessary. Ten went out with a bang of glory, but the titanic status which Tennant’s Doctor reached (Time Lord Victorious, anyone?) is not one that can be healthily sustained by a person, or by a show. Eleven needs a deconstruction.

In  _the Eleventh Hour_ , the Doctor promises a little girl five minutes and instead gifts her with twelve years, four psychiatrists, and a scary crack in her wall. In _Amy’s Choice_ , there’s this conversation (all the more striking, because Eleven has some serious guilt where Amy Pond is involved):

> **Amy Pond:** Save him. You save everyone. You always do. That’s what you do.
> 
> **The Doctor:**  Not always. I’m sorry.
> 
> **Amy Pond:** Then what is the point of you?

Amy’s loss of trust in the Doctor over series Five and Six is one of the main weapons in bringing the Doctor back down to earth. She certainly lost trust in his promises and his timeliness in  _The Eleventh Hour_ , but she didn’t stop believing he was her magical policeman fairy godfather, here to rescue her. That loss of trust in this magic man rescuing her (because tied up in her lack of trust is also a desperate longing for it, and this magic man in a magic box has a direct link back to before she closed her barriers entirely) was necessary both for her growth, but also for the Doctor’s.

The companions have long been the source of his morality, his empathy, and his sense of self-worth; his audience, his gauge, and his conscience. To use a  _companion_  to remind the Doctor that he is mortal and deeply fallible was, I think, a very clever move.

As the episodes roll on, the Doctor loses Rory (and loses Rory and loses Rory), sees his TARDIS explode (though they fix it, thank you magical imagination of Amy Pond), leaves an older and broken Amy Pond to cease to exist, in  _the_   _God Complex_  very obviously and blatantly is forced to break Amy’s trust in him, and finally has to let himself die (metaphorically, which was pretty much exactly the intent).

From  _A Good Man Goes to War_ :

> **Amy** : They’re talking like he’s famous. The Doctor isn’t famous.
> 
> **Lorna** : He meets a lot of people. Some of them remember. He’s sort of like a… I don’t know. A Dark Legend.

That Dark Legend is exactly what we’re trying to break, so that he can rebuild. Eleven’s story is one long humbling of the Doctor. In a lot of ways, it’s his death; the death of his legend, the death of Time Lord Victorious.

But back to Amy and trust issues. Sometimes I get distracted, folks.

> **The Doctor:**  Amy, you need to start trusting me. It’s never been more important.
> 
> **Amy Pond:** But you don’t always tell me the truth.

Here is one of the things that trust hinges on for Amy Pond. No one always tells her the truth; to everyone but the Doctor, she has seen and heard too many otherworldly things for any sane and normal person to know more than she does. She tells them the truth ( _there’s a crack in my wall and it whispers; a police box crashed on my lawn and a crazy man stepped out of it and ate fish fingers and custard with me_ ), and they tell her she’s wrong. How can she trust others to tell her the truth, when they call the truth lies?

And then, the one man crazy enough to believe the truth she says, the one man with more authority on Truth than even the Girl Who Hears the Universe Every Night—well, the Doctor still treats her like a child with a fairy-tale name.

When he imagines her in the TARDIS, that’s how he sees her (I think that’s in _Let’s Kill Hitler_?), as little Amelia Pond. He lies to her when he thinks he needs to—because that’s one of the Doctor’s biggest flaws, that he makes decisions for other people (Nine sending Rose away in the TARDIS, Ten wiping Donna’s mind (making the decision for her that she’d rather live as the brash, oblivious, self-deprecating temp from Ipswich than die with the song of the Ood in her memory), Eleven not telling them his suspicions about the Flesh in  _The Almost People_  or keeping his big secret plan from them in  _The Wedding of River Song_  (and that one, admittedly, nearly ended the universe until he wised up and told River what he was doing)—whether or not his decisions are right, or noble, or whatever, he makes them  _for_  others). 

So, Amy? Her life has decidedly not proven to her that other people should be trusted to tell her what’s true, nor that they should be trusted to stay, no matter what promises they make. She is terrified of loss, of broken trust, because they have happened so often to her. She has too many open wounds to let anyone, even dependable Rory, close enough to damage her again. From all of her experiences with the world? That decision, that distance she holds between her and others, is actually the smart thing to do. My sixth grade science teacher had a saying: If you walk into a wall and say  _it hurts,_  I won’t think any less of you. But if you walk into a wall  _twice_ , then you’re an idiot.

Amy Pond’s not an idiot. Rory’s offering her promises and loyalty, and she’s holding him at arms-length with sarcasm and aloofness because she know what happens with promises ( _five minutes!_ ). He’s just damn stubborn. They’re a good match in that way, the Girl Who Waited and the Boy Who Waited. The only people in the world who know how to out-stubborn them are each other.

_Amy’s Choice_ , I think, teaches Amy to realize that she  _wants_  Rory to stay. She learns that, despite all her protests, she loves him. But I don’t think that she, yet, trusts him. That takes her a much longer time. The Doctor’s right to bring Rory on the TARDIS (even if it gets him killed, and killed, and killed…). Sharing the adventures with Rory shapes their relationship into something functional as they learn to rely on each other— he, I think, has always had her on a pedestal, something grand and wild and worth fighting for, which she is; but she’s also lot more: a person, flawed and broken, and someone who will fight, too, for him. And she, of course, has been holding this loyal, stubborn boy at arms-length for years (Rory’s not in love with me, he’s gay, she says at seventeen ( _Let’s Kill Hitler_ ), because Amy Pond is terrible at recognizing patient love when she sees it, can’t imagine that Rory’s simply waiting for  _her_ ). She doesn’t know how to believe that she  _can_ trust him.

But Amy Pond, who doesn’t believe in heroes, in fairy-tales, or that people can be trusted, watches Rory fight off vampires (unsuccessfully) with a broom, wait 2000 years to keep her safe, follow her across galaxies and centuries— eventually even she is convinced that Rory Williams (Rory Pond), alone among creatures, will keep his promises.

We get a glimpse of it in  _The Day of the Moon_ , when she is taken by the Silence but has her audio-recording device, and she tells Rory she loves him (and it’s telling that with her rather ambiguous delivery of that information even  _Rory_  is unconvinced that she means  _him_ and not the Doctor—Rory loves her, sure, but he needs to learn, too, that she loves  _him_ _,_ that  _he_  can trust  _her_  to mean it).

Even here though, it’s that she wants him, that she demands his presence, that she loves him, not that she knows he’ll come. That last step doesn’t come until  _A Good Man Goes to War_.

> **Amy:**  There’s somebody coming. I don’t know where he is, or what he’s doing, but trust me. He’s on his way.

Somewhere, over the course of two series, in so many deaths and returns and alternate universes, Amy Pond learned to trust.

(This is part of why  _the Girl Who Waited_  is so heart-breaking. At this point, she’s come to trust Rory, a brave and terrifying risk for her. She’s come to trust his promise that he will always be there. And Old!Amy had to face thirty-six years of slowly realizing that even Rory can break a promise. He saves young!Amy in the end and keeps it, and the Amy who carries on in the story will never know the slow and crushing despair of Old!Amy’s realization that she was  _right_  not to expect them to come for her, but I think that weary, brave woman with her hand pressed up against the TARDIS window is something Rory will never forget and something he will never forgive himself for— but that’s Rory’s story, not Amy’s).

In the end, it is Rory who “saves” Amy (or rather it is Rory who Amy chooses to trust, because at the end of it all, this is and always will be  _Amy’s_  choice). We cannot live standing on our own; learning to trust was a vital discovery for her. And I think it’s fascinating that it’s not the mad man in a box, the Santa-sent police man, who repairs her faith; but the nurse who quietly, loyally loves her.

This is Amy’s biggest deviation from the other companions, I think. It was the Doctor and his adventures that showed Rose “a better way to live,” as a hero and not a bystander; it was the Doctor who taught Martha, badass protege of badass, that she could be a warrior as well as a healer, that she could save more lives than she had ever imagined, that “she was good”; it was the Doctor who proved to Donna that she was wonderfully, gloriously worthwhile, that she could be the most important woman in the universe. He saved them, for a certain definition of “saving” which doesn’t get my hackles up; but the person most essential to Amy’s growth wasn’t the Doctor. It was Rory.

The Doctor, in a lot of ways, was nonessential to Amy Pond. The Doctor, in a lot of ways, wasn’t giving her a gift when he stole her away on her wedding night, but making up for past mistakes.

To each of his companions he gives the stars, all of time and creation; but Amy, who in some ways already had the universe anyway, was the first one to be given the stars not as a flight of fancy, not because he saw something wonderful in her and wanted to bring it out, but because he owed a debt to Amelia, to a little girl he once left behind. The tables in the relationship are a little turned, here, between the Scottish girl and her Doctor. Every other companion, I think, has to some degree owed the Doctor for changing their lives; but Amy is owed  _by_  the Doctor for scarring hers.

The story that ran from  _the Eleventh Hour_  to  _the Wedding of River Song_  was meant to repair Amy Pond from the damage the Doctor and the cracks in the world did to her; and it was meant to break the Doctor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted here: http://ink-splotch.tumblr.com/post/25660392166/for-amy-this-is-a-story-about-growing-up-about


End file.
